


Baby, I've Heard This Song Before

by wraithnoir



Category: Marvel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Established Relationship, Fandom Trumps Hate, M/M, Some Plot, Stucky is still my jam, but oddly this is my first fic for them, some torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21687169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wraithnoir/pseuds/wraithnoir
Summary: Living and loving together in the now is easy. Trying to remember his past with Steve is hard. A rehabilitating Winter Soldier is chaperoned on all his missions by Captain America. Bucky's faulty memory is giving him some trouble as he heads out to Europe with Steve, leading him to some realizations when confronted with old demons.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 3
Kudos: 34
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2019





	Baby, I've Heard This Song Before

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZepysGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZepysGirl/gifts).



Morning in Brooklyn dawned as it dawned anywhere else, but to Bucky the light was always just a little more golden, just a little lighter, than he’d seen it elsewhere. There were probably nicer places to live, places with cleaner streets and bigger bathrooms, but New York City had always been home and he didn’t foresee himself ever losing the love he felt in the early morning for the city that had brought him up. He knelt up on his bed, arms crossed on the windowsill and head stuck out the open window. The noises were filtering up from the street, but they were diffuse in the morning air; the sounds blew in with the breeze that moved his hair on his forehead. It was going to be a scorcher out there today. July in the city was a brutal month, whether you were five or ninety-five. James Buchanan Barnes at fifteen was ready to sweat and enjoy it. No school, no homework, just glorious mornings and brilliant hot sunsets, bottle rockets and afternoon shifts stocking shelves at Mr. O’Flaherty’s. Summer was the best of the four seasons, even better than Christmas. He took a deep breath as he felt the mattress beside him shift, the old springs giving easily to the weight next to him. 

“How hot you think it’s going to get today, Buck?” Steve asked, voice gravelly with sleep. He smiled at his friend when Bucky pulled his head back into his bedroom. “I bet you it hits 90.” 

“That’s it? Heck, I bet it’ll top out at 95!” Bucky said with a head shake. He grinned at Steve; the other teen’s blond hair was sticking up in unruly chunks, the edges seeming oddly square and spiky at the same time. His eyes were still half-closed. He wasn’t the fan of early mornings that Bucky was, but he did at least make the effort when he was sleeping over. “You look like a hedgehog just coming out of hibernation.”

“Do hedgehogs even hibernate?” Steve asked, hand running over his head in a vain effort to smooth his hair. It was going to take water and a comb and a prayer to make this work out. 

“I dunno,” Bucky said with a laugh, flopping down onto his bed again. “Do I look like a scientist?” 

“Yeah, just like I look like a hedgehog, you look like a scientist,” Steve said, kneeling up to take his friend’s place in front of the window for a moment. It wasn’t a great view, but Bucky was right-- it was better in the morning. The buildings rose out of the pavement with an eagerness they seemed to lose as the day went on, and they were all coated with the still-golden early morning sun. He would never say it out loud like that, though, but his mind went to his watercolor palette and how he could paint buildings that were square and heavy but still bright like sunlight.

“You think?” Bucky said, rubbing his hands over his face. “Lucky scientists.” He laughed and swung his leg to the side, knowing the punch was coming. Not that Steve would hit him hard enough to do any damage. Not that Steve could, really. So when Bucky moved and Steve missed, pressing his fist into the tangled bedsheets instead, neither was too surprised when he lost his balance entirely and ended up sprawled half on top of Bucky. Both boys laughed loudly, adding to the noise that was starting to spiral up from the city streets below, coltish limbs tangling as they mock-wrestled on the twin bed until Steve was hopelessly caught. Not that he was trying too hard to get away. It wasn’t hot enough to worry about bare skin on bare skin. It was comfortable enough to just lie there on rumpled sheets, and a pillow that had gotten wedged under one leg, and to listen to their laughter and breaths return to normal. 

The humidity of summer was already affecting Steve, and he hated hearing how much longer it took for him to catch his breath than it took his friend. For a horrible minute, the room seemed to contract and collapse in on him as his lungs warred with the air itself. There was a scrambling moment of sitting up, trying to make it all look as natural as anything. It wasn’t that Bucky didn’t know the laundry list of his ailments, or the things that could make his life just that much more difficult; his friend had never looked down on him for not being as fast, as strong, for having spring allergies or an inability to eat shellfish. But Steve never wanted to spark the pity in his friend’s eyes that he saw in others around him. Thus far, in the years and years they’d been friends, he’d never seen Bucky look at him like that. Never with mocking, never with pity. He wasn’t sure what had set his friend apart from the rest of humanity, but he was grateful for it, more than he could ever actually let on. 

“Steve?” The worry in Bucky’s voice (still not pity, thank God it wasn’t pity, a clear part of Steve’s brain still managed to think) wasn’t something the teenager was looking to hide. He knew how the humidity of summer was sometimes just as bad as the damp cold that winter brought on; what was a cold for him turned into pneumonia for Steve, and apparently what was a warm morning that promised a sweltering day for him was an asthma attack waiting to happen for Steve. 

Bucky found himself holding himself in a tense, odd posture, somewhere between sitting and kneeling, all his muscles ready to...what? Yell for his mom? He rubbed his hands anxiously on his thighs, his attention pulled between Steve’s expression (the way he screwed his eyes closed so tightly, the way he seemed frozen to the spot as he obviously struggled for an easy breath) and the heat he was building up between his palms and the friction of his pajama pants. The minute stretched out long between them, his hands feeling as though they were on fire and Steve, skin pale and clammy even as the sun rose enormous and bright outside. Bucky almost felt that he would scream, that he’d yell because something in that moment compelled him to break it. But all the air was gone; he could feel it too, something of Steve’s panic and pain in that long moment when he fought against the world and the body it had given him. It translated into something else for him, something that didn’t have words but made his hands feel so warm they had to be burning. 

“Steve!” he said, hearing his own voice harsh and low as he reached forward. Rolling up to kneeling, he was on the brink, he felt with odd and sudden clarity, of falling over the edge of something, or that Steve was, and he was the only one who could stop the freefall. His hand, burning like its own sun, was on Steve’s back and, in that minute, they were the only two people in the whole world, and all Steve needed was a deep breath and that was all Bucky needed as well…

“Steve!” His voice was harsh and slightly hoarse this time, and Bucky found himself sitting up in a different bed, in a different bedroom, in a different time. So different that it might as well have been on the moon, something out of a movie with space suits and aliens and...all the things Bucky now knew were real and now. There were none of those things in this room, which was dark apart from the little bit of sun that had managed to creep around the edge of curtains that seemed utilitarian to him but that Tony had assured him were “very modern, very minimalist, you’ll love them.” Whatever all that meant.

He exhaled slowly, feeling too hot even in the air-conditioned room. Mid-summer should have felt warmer, shouldn’t have been comfortable under a sheet and fluffy duvet, dark blue that was black in the shade-darkened room. Bucky was still half-caught in his nightmare; the sweat on his back was instantly cold in the room and he slid his hand across the other side of the bed to find...anything. His fingers only encountered soft sheets that were faintly creased from the pressure of another body. Steve. He inhaled deeply, curling his hand around the sheets as though there was some warmth left in them he could use to center himself.

His name was James Buchanan Barnes. His birthday was March 10, 1917. He had been born in Brooklyn, but now he was in Manhattan. He was on the 58th floor of Tony Stark’s giant highrise building, he had been asleep beside Steve Rogers. Who was also Captain America and not the skinny kid gasping with asthma he’d been so helpless beside in his dream. Nightmare. That was the funny thing about his dreams. He never knew if they were weird things his mind had cooked up just like everyone else’s did or if they were actual memories from his actual past. Bucky was very aware of the fact that for other people, it was probably pretty easy to tell the two apart. He was less lucky. There were the tortures, the assassinations, the strange locales, then there were the snow days in New York, ice cream at Coney Island, the puppy rescued from a sewer. His dreams pulled them all together and mixed them with things that were impossible. Like the heat of his hand as it was drawn to Steve’s back, knowing without words that he could help him breathe somehow. 

He looked down at his hand now. The curve of the metal thumb caught that stray beam of sunlight and reflected it back, a strange angle that made him squint and turn his hand to get it out of his eyes. It was strange to think how long this arm had been part of him, years and years while he was ice, crystallized, something pulled out of time. But the arm had been there, his and not his. As much a part of him as anything else. He wasn’t some robot from a comic book, those pulp yellowed sheets he and Steve had eaten up as kids. He didn’t accidentally crush coffee cups or punch through walls when trying to hang up clothes-- it was him, not a piece apart from him.

Nonetheless, he didn’t like to touch Steve with it. His friend had never pulled away from his hand, patted his left shoulder with no hesitation. But Bucky felt the cringe in his own gut and couldn’t imagine that it wasn’t an echo of one in Steve’s. He flexed his fingers, watching the hypnotizing perfection of joints. Not some robot from a comic book-- his arm was built even better than the flesh parts of his body were, and there was something disturbing and tragic and exciting in that too.

As the morning clarified around him, the dream dissipated into the smell of breakfast and coffee, the sounds that made it through the bedroom wall from the kitchen and made the rest of Bucky’s life settle for a moment, at least. Maple sausage and coffee with too much sugar covered a variety of evils; it felt shallow to think that food could make the larger problems go away, but who had never been comforted by French fries or the perfect cannoli? 

“Morning,” he rumbled rather than said as he made his way into the kitchen. He’d been a morning person before, hadn’t he? Now he felt groggy and Steve was like morning sunshine as he poked at the frying pan on the stove. “Didn’t Tony say you could just order those up in the morning?”

Steve looked over and Bucky was surprised all over again. His brain, dodgy at the best of times, still struggled to overlay the many forms his friend had been over the years, weaving in and out of his memories and nightmares and experiences. Stick-thin Steve measuring himself against Bucky’s shoulder when his friend’s growth spurt hit and his didn’t. Broad-shouldered Steve with his worried, vulnerable eyebrows as they fled a HYDRA facility in France. This Steve, in a blue bathrobe with his blond hair catching the light from the window behind him to create gold, turning away quickly because the toast was burning.

“Darn it all!”

The smile felt teased out of Bucky’s mouth, one corner lifting before the other as he stepped into Steve’s place by the stove and took his own turn rolling the sausages as they sizzled and spit. It was natural, their movements together in the kitchen, and while they hadn’t started out that way, Bucky was now very aware that their suite here in Stark Tower, Avengers Tower, was a shared space for them both rather than just a place Bucky was crashing while he sorted out the plane wreck of his life.

“Maybe we should just stick to sausage,” Bucky said wryly as he turned his head to watch Steve drop the blackened slices onto a plate using the very tips of his fingers.

“No, no, we can salvage this,” Steve said, though the little line between his eyebrows belied his optimism. “I’ll just...scratch off the burned stuff and cover it all with lots of butter.”

“Sure, lots of butter. That’ll fix it.” 

“And jelly. Lots of that too,” Steve said good-naturedly over the dry rasping sound of the knife scraping over the surface of the burned toast. Most of the black was coming off, but that also meant leaving strange dark patches and other weirdly pale bits. Bucky didn’t wait for the sausages to meet a similar fate; even if it could be argued that they could have used another minute, he pulled them out of the pan and set them on the plate waiting on the counter.

He nearly threw the plate across the room as Steve passed behind him to get to the fridge. Steve put his hand on Bucky’s metal arm as he slid past him, his hand activating sensors that let Bucky feel every fingerprint, the exact pressure of his palm, the steadiness of someone who didn’t pull away from him. Steve’s hand was an anchor and something inside Bucky lurched. He set the plate down carefully.

“‘Scuse me, just going to grab the butter…” Steve carried on, not noticing the weird internal strife his lover was dealing with. “You all set to fly to Berlin today?”

“That’s today?” Bucky frowned. He’d thought he had an extra day. Missions were coming more frequently; he was an adjunct Avenger, at least, though he was never given a mission that Steve hadn’t come along on. They were a team, Steve insisted. Bucky didn’t mind him there, of course, but he was also very aware that he was being chaperoned. 

“Yeah, soon as we’re ready. No rush; eat breakfast, shower, take your time.” Steve didn’t look up from where he was applying butter to the mangled slices of toast as though he was priming a canvas for an oil painting. Even spreading it all the way to the very edges of the crusts (or what remained of them) wasn’t hiding the damage underneath. Maybe the jelly would mask that.

“Yeah, yeah, it won’t take me long. A shower would be good though.” Bucky shook off the remainder of his dream as though he couldn’t still feel the outline of Steve’s hand on the cool metal of his arm, as though his brain and his eyes weren’t warring between which version of Steve to believe in right now. Coffee. Coffee would rinse the rest of that nightmare away. He wanted to ask Steve about it, if that too-bright summer morning had really happened or if it was the product of his still-muddled brain. But when the other man turned back to him and dropped a piece of toast onto his plate, Bucky found that he didn’t know how to ask. Instead he let himself lose the moment in the oddly jewel-like shine that the sunlight gave the grape jelly and the knowledge that, whatever else had changed over the years, at least something like grape jelly was a constant.

Apparently he’d waited too long to say something. Steve, already seated at the counter that served them as a table for quick meals, was waiting and watching him with concern.

“Buck.” His voice was slightly lower, the voice that was intimate between them, earnest and private. It was the voice he used in bed when they could relish the fact that they were both alive, were together, had the privacy and time they had maybe always wanted, and the voice he used when Bucky woke them both up with his nightmares. 

Bucky glanced over at him, not turning his head but only shifting his eyes. The coffee mug in his hand was steady, and that’s what mattered right now.  
“You sure you’re alright? If you need the day, take it.” 

“I’m alright. Just…” Bucky took a deep breath, bringing his mug over to the counter and sitting beside Steve. He pressed his mouth before continuing. “Just a weird dream.” He sipped his coffee before picking up a piece of toast; it crumbled into three pieces in his hand. Raising his eyebrows at Steve, he took a bite of the piece that hadn’t fallen back down onto the plate. Jelly-side down, of course.

“You want to talk about it?” Steve asked, looking down to his own breakfast. Bucky appreciated the lack of eye contact, knowing it for what it was. Steve wasn’t avoiding him or making light of what he’d said, he was giving him what privacy he could in the bright morning light of a kitchen. Their kitchen, Bucky reminded himself. He was here and he was now and he was with Steve. 

Bite, chew, swallow. Notice the charred flavor that remains, the salty butter, the sweet slick jam. Bite, chew, swallow. 

“Nope,” Bucky said finally. “It’s already mostly gone, you know?” Like a normal dream, not the kind that lingered with a bad taste in your mouth like a memory. “Just still have the itchy feeling on the back of my neck.”

Steve’s hand was warm and sure as it clasped the back of Bucky’s neck, fingers threaded through his hair. This time their eyes met, both blue, though Steve’s were more gray and Bucky’s more green. It was Steve who had pointed that out after a color theory class. Bucky thought of it more that Steve’s eyes were sky and his were water. He didn’t get color theory. What he did get was how steady Steve’s hand was, the callus on his palm grounding against his skin. If anything could make the lingering dread dissipate, maybe this was it. No one touched him like Steve did.

“Well...choke down your toast, shower, then we’ll get out of town and see if some travel helps, okay?” Steve asked, leaving his hand where it was as he leaned in to kiss Bucky’s temple. Bucky stayed still, feeling himself take a deep breath for maybe the first time that day. After another second he nodded, then the life moved back into his limbs as Steve pulled his hand away, as though he’d taken some of the inertia with him. 

The flight to Berlin was predictably smooth; these weren’t wartime skies, and air travel was downright relaxing when no one was shooting at you. Bucky sat in a comfortable seat on the Quinjet, eyes moving over the mission information. Steve seemed to stand whenever possible, making himself an outline against whatever he stood near, so he leaned against the bulkhead as he looked over the tablet in his hand.

Bucky set down the iPad in his lap, glancing up. 

“Why does this sound so familiar?” he asked with a little frown. It wasn’t an unusual question from him, and he’d stopped being as self-conscious about asking it. Sometimes it would be something as simple as a movie or a food (it had been a weird day when he’d remembered Cracker Jacks). Sometimes it was a world event. Sometimes there was a horrible, personal reason that he remembered a certain trigger, a spiral that could be set off in his mind as he tried to swim against the rip current of the past. 

“Schloss Itter?” Steve looked up, expression a little careful. “It was on the Commando list. It was number seven.” The list had been a mission checklist of items the Howling Commandos were working their way through with Captain America. Bucky had fallen on mission number five. 

Bucky nodded slowly, looking back to the information before him. So it was just a familiar name, not an event he should remember. He hadn’t been there. He’d been dead. Well, not dead. But dead to everyone else. His mind was still mostly blank from that time, but he imagined that was part and parcel of having your arm ripped off. 

“So I’m looking through the history here...I’m seeing that it was a prison. Then a hotel and now it belongs to someone privately. A castle.” He shook his head, swiping through the pages of information. “When do we get to what we’re doing? Also, technically this is Austria, not Germany.”

“Underneath the castle…” Steve paused, swiping through some images on his own tablet, then swiping back. “Where did it...go…” 

Bucky got up and dropped his own iPad onto the seat, walking over to stand by Steve. Without thinking, he put his hand on his back--his left hand--as he looked over the readout with him.

“What’re you looking for?”

“The schematics. I had them here a second ago, then...went down a rabbit hole and now I have a local menu.” Steve smiled ruefully at his lover while Bucky just grinned openly as he reached to go back through the tabs and find the pages Steve was looking for. “Yeah, those are them. Okay, these are top levels, down through here. And you can see that it’s obviously been remodeled. Mostly for the hotel; the current owner had renovations done here for private living quarters, but has left the rest as it was. Down here are all the hotel standards, kitchens, laundry rooms.”

“Okay, and I’m guessing we’re going into those unused places. For...what?” Bucky stepped back to watch Steve. 

“Stark’s monitors picked up strange energy pulses in the area, then pinpointed them to the castle with recon drones. We’re here to check it out and recover whatever it is. Or disable it.” 

“You say energy pulse, but I’m hearing weapons. Was this a weapons drop?” A HYDRA weapons drop. Bucky trawled his memory for something useful, but considering his periodic service for HYDRA, he didn’t know a lot of their other plans.

“Don’t know. Some sort of tech, but it’s hard to say weapons,” Steve admitted.

“I feel like we should have someone a little more tech savvy along,” Bucky said dryly. “Two old men who barely know what an automobile is seem like a weird choice.”

“I feel like we can handle it.” Steve tried to push optimism into his voice, but all it did was make the injection of uncertainty in it that much more obvious. He looked up when Bucky’s fingers slid over his, the fingers of his right hand, the hand he was allowed to touch Steve with. Steve shifted his hand so that his fingers moved to the spaces between Bucky’s, dropping Captain America and just being Steve. The shield had nothing to do with it.

“I’m sure we can handle it,” Bucky said quietly, letting his awareness drop into the way their skin warmed together in the climate-controlled chill of the Quinjet. Times like this were good times, alone times, or rather, just the two of them times when they weren’t surrounded by other people who sometimes still, even without meaning to, stepped away slightly when he walked up. 

It was Steve who turned slightly, tugging on their hands slightly as though gravity had some extra effect on the physics of them together. It was Steve would leaned in, leaned down slightly to close that few-inch gap that this height gave him now (still hard to get used to, how it messed with the other half-memories in his head). He never kissed Bucky directly on the mouth at first, like he was giving him a place to back out of, an excuse that was ready made if Bucky wanted to make it an accident.

But Bucky never wanted an escape or an excuse. There were few things that made as much sense as Steve, and knowing that their skin touching was as close as he could get to that steadiness, that normalcy, there was never a time he didn’t want it. Even in the minutes after a nightmare, he’d found without truly consciously realizing that Steve’s hand on his shoulder, his thigh, the back of his neck, between his shoulder blades, was the rock and anchor that brought him back to himself. The kiss that began on the corner of his mouth was a doorway; he turned his head to catch more of it on his lips. 

It was an invitation for both of them. Neither needed anything more spelled out. It was as though they knew each other on a cellular level, something that even past history couldn’t explain. The number of times they’d found and lost and found and lost one another were bricks on a wall around them, but the foundation went deeper and kept them safer when they needed to be safe, when they needed to be insulated from a world that had rushed forward toward them like a tidal wave. Without the other, they each would have fallen. 

Bucky’s hand moved to cradle Steve’s jaw, his thumb sliding along the sharp line of bone beneath his smooth-shaven skin. He thought of watching Steve shave every morning, the swift line of the razor blade through the foam. When they were younger, Steve had shaved without needing to, matching up with what other young men were doing in action without necessity. Neither of them ever mentioned it. It was just an accepted thing that happened, a thing that Bucky knew, and that Steve knew with him, and together they knew secrets about one another that the rest of the world didn’t need. Never needed. Captain America had a smooth jaw, and the man who had been and was still the Winter Soldier without the words meaning quite what anyone thought they did knew that once a frail boy had pretended to shave that jaw because there was no beard to shear away. He felt the firm grip of Steve’s hand now on the back of his neck, that anchor, as their kiss deepened and became something real. Some things Bucky wondered if he imagined, history, his own life, his own memories. This was solid.

He turned to push Steve back against the wall of the Quinjet, some part of him realizing that he was only able to do it that easily because Steve wanted him to do it. His right hand had closed around Steve’s wrist, and he felt the other man’s smile curving against his. He also knew what that meant, that particular smile. Feeling it and not even seeing it, he knew what that meant. 

Pulling back, he meant Steve’s eyes, which were bright and amused and wanting more. He was also wanting more, and it was almost existentially unfair that it was not the time. 

“Later, Buck,” Steve said quietly. He didn’t push away from the wall or move to take his hand out of Bucky’s grip. 

“Because we’re being professionals?” Bucky asked with a wry, crooked smile. “I can do this very professionally.” He darted in with another quick kiss before Steve could reply and was rewarded with a laugh.

“Yeah, but I really don’t want to hang out here. Let’s go do what we came here for, drop it off, then...I don’t know. Maybe we can take a vacation.” He said it casually, oddly shyly, like he was afraid of Bucky’s reaction to the suggestion.

“A vacation? Disneyland?” Disneyland, as a concept, was bizarre and hysterical and fascinating to Bucky. It was a running joke for them that that’s where they would go to relax, surrounded by screaming children, grumpy sunburned adults, and people dressed up in costumes of characters neither of them recognized. Bucky didn’t quite get the difference between Disneyland and Disneyworld, and Steve had sort of fumbled an explanation, which was usually the sign that he didn’t actually know either. 

“Maybe not Disneyland.” Steve’s grin grew a little as he stepped away sideways, tapping the back of his hand against Bucky’s hip. “Like...a beach or something.” 

“A beach.” Bucky let himself smile, watching as Steve busied himself with checking the flight plan. The autopilot would be turning off shortly, and then it really would be down to business. “What do they do on beaches nowadays?”

“I can’t imagine it’s that different,” Steve said as he took his seat, taking over control of the jet. “Throw a ball, play in the water…”

“Nearly get drowned by the undertow,” Bucky spoke up as he walked to take the co-pilot’s seat. His grin was teasing and crooked when Steve glanced over to meet it. “Too soon?”

“Always too soon,” Steve smiled back. “Okay, landing in fifteen. I’ve got a good spot we can keep the jet, then we’ll go in on foot. It’s going to be chilly.”

“That suits me just fine.” Whatever he was now, it had been born out of the cold. It didn’t bug him like it used to, and while he knew logically that it was conditioned out of him, he sometimes felt like it was something more than that missing from him. Winter Soldier. Was he someone who should even be thinking about a beach? Then Steve reached over, like he knew exactly what he was thinking, and just set his hand over his, and his palm was warm (in his memories, Steve had always had cold hands in winter, but they were both different now) against the tensing of Bucky’s knuckles. Something melted in the center of him, a layered glacial ball that sat in the pit of his stomach. Steve’s touch took a layer off each time. 

Schloss Itter was impressive as they made their approach from the south. The stones were heavy and gray, built the way things were no longer built. Hell, they hadn’t been built like that back in his own time even. Monuments to the men who made them, and usually to how badly they wanted to be remembered rather than to their actual memory, castles were tucked all over the mountains of Austria. As the two of them walked up, Bucky had had this weird feeling that Steve planned to march in the front door. Half of him felt like whoever answered the door would see that perfect smile and invite them in for cocoa.

The other half of him, the bigger half, knew that that would just cause a firefight before they even made it fully into the building. So they were approaching a door that was half buried in snow and that didn’t seem to get much use. It had shown up on the schematics attached to several hallways, likely ways of getting supplies in at some point. It would work well enough for their purposes. 

There was no alarm when they got the door open using one of Starks toys, which Steve put back into his utility belt as soon as it had done its job (“Tony’ll kill me if I forget another one.”). Inside, the hallway was just about as cold as the snowy landscape had been, though there was no wind, so it was an improvement. Using the schematics projecting from his computer cuff, Bucky took point as they moved into halls that were a little more lit. Sure, Steve knew what to do with that shield, but all the same, Bucky liked to be able to put a quick bullet in someone. He didn’t say this aloud, of course, because whenever he said things like that, things that went beyond the forests they’d fought in during the war, there was something sad caught in Steve’s lower eyelashes, something that trembled for half a second before disappearing. The half second hurt every single time. 

Steve made a noise behind him and Bucky immediately stopped short, gun raised. A second later, Bucky heard it too-- the crackle of static that sounded like an old radio, someone fiddling with a dial to find the right station, the right frequency. For a bizarre, disorienting moment, he expected something specific to come through, a song with mellow brass, the address of a president who hadn’t been president in a long long time. 

“Cap...n...Rogers…” The pieces of words were staccato like gunfire through the waves of sharp static. Bucky glanced back and saw the muscles in Steve’s jaw work. His own senses were on high alert, but there was no visible enemy. He couldn’t exactly shoot out the speaker and expect whatever this was to be solved. They were recognized. Steve was recognized anyway. “How ki...to drop in.” 

The two shared a look, then Steve gestured with his chin to move forward as the crackly voice continued on the old sound system.

“My grandson said you would never...at last.” A harsh sound came through the speakers, and Bucky wasn’t sure if it was a laugh, a cough, or just the same static feedback that seemed to overcome the system from time to time. “Fitting...our tomb.”

Steve checked their coordinates again as they moved down the hallway, the voice following them from the speakers mounted at regular intervals. Neither reacted much to it; villains loved to talk, and much of the time, if you didn’t react and just kept doing what you were there to do, you could get through more than they expected. Steve nodded when they were standing outside a door that was painted institutional green like the rest of them. There was a number ‘four’ plague riveted to the metal, and then a darker outline on the paint that indicated that, at some point, there had been another four attached beside it. 

“So...it’s just in there?” Bucky whispered, brow furrowed as he looked around the doorway. His trained eye didn’t see anything that would indicate an alarm or a trap, but obviously the other side of the door could have been rigged up with anything.

Steve glanced down at the device he’d been using to track their location and nodded. “This thing Tony gave me doesn’t show anything inside except that. No explosives, no guards.”

Bucky snorted, lowering his gun as he reached for the doorknob. “Yeah, how many times have I heard that before?” 

“You will find…” the voice from the speaker continued in its jerky cadence, the accent heavy even through the shoddy communication. “What you…” Again, that cackling cough. It raised every hair on the back of Bucky’s neck as he turned the knob.

“It’s not even locked,” he muttered, and while it had been bad before, that cemented it. The staticky laugh continued as the lights flickered on in the room, that yellow glare that hummed in old bulbs. The content crate looked as Bucky imagined it would, as his old memories told him it should. At old weapon, a new weapon, it didn’t matter. In his mind, the crates always looked like this, with stenciled letters and numbers on the sides, the metal painted gray, no matter what government, what organization, what country it belonged to. 

“It’s empty,” Steve said from behind him as they walked in. The crate stood there in the fractured light when one of the bulb filaments snapped and half the room went dark. He walked past Bucky, footsteps heavy with certainty. The perfectionist in him made him continue forward, reaching to snap the clasp on the side of the crate. The latch fell open and clanged against the side of the crate, the noise loud in the room. Empty, hollow. Metal on metal. Bucky thought of his own fingers on the latch, what that would sound like. 

He stepped forward as Steve threw back the lid. As predicted the crate was empty, some shreds of what looked like old newspaper. Bucky watched him reach in, pick up one of the shreds, then rub it to dust between his gloved fingers. The motes of it hung for a moment in the air like powder off a moth’s wings. They stood silently, shoulder to shoulder, hearing the crackle of the static from the hallway behind them through the open door.

“We need to go,” Bucky said, voice low and urgent. 

“Buck, it could still be here. Somewhere else-”

“Steve. We need to go. Right now. This was a trap with your name on it.”

The static sharpened, coalesced into words. That interrupted version of Steve’s name, his wartime rank. His name. “Cap….gers…” 

“Right now, Steve.” Bucky reached over and gripped Steve’s shoulder quickly with his right hand (never the left). “Let it go. It’s not here. That’s not what this is.” 

Out in the hallway, the static was a constant, electrifying the cold, musty air. They headed back down the way they’d come, but just when they reached the end of the hallway, a partition came down, a thick wall suddenly where it had been an opening before. The hallway rumbled with it when it slammed down, metal against metal in the tracks and then against the concrete floor. Some of the lights flickered, but Bucky didn’t hesitate. 

“Other way. Map showed there was another exit on the other side. We’ll go up that way,” he grunted, halting and immediately reversing course. He kept his eyes on the door as he walked backwards a few steps, then turned and ran after Steve. They passed the open door, then more and more doors like it, faded gray paint on metal. Their running steps punctuated the unrelenting static hissing from the speakers above them, boots on concrete a dull noise.  
Bucky hated it, running like this. Feeling trapped underground with no visible enemy. That’s not what he was made for. No, not those words. He wasn’t born for it. That was safer. As a kid, he had been a brawler, one who didn’t stand for insults and bullies, even when the bullies gave him the option of joining in. He needed to be part of the solution, he needed to be the one doing something. He didn’t want to be waiting; he hated the time going to and away from the fight. The fight made him feel like he was worth something. He needed to use his hands, and if they weren’t good enough to touch another person with, at least he could use them for something to keep that person safe. 

“Turn here!” Steve said as he rounded a corner. They pounded up a metal staircase, then another that wound a tight spiral. The static had faded out behind them, but there was a new rumbling that Bucky had felt but hadn’t wanted to mention. A tomb, that old voice had said. An old man, an old enemy, willing to bring the whole place down. An explosion closer to them rumbled and the staircase was wrenched when a nearby wall collapsed. 

They scrambled up onto the landing, out of breath as the staircase fell away below them. Steve had pulled Bucky up the last few steps, and now was lying on top of them as they took a moment to regroup. 

“He’s bringing the whole thing down,” Steve said, the words forced out between breaths. 

“We can make it up,” Bucky said, mind already running through all the escapes, all the strategies. They raced through cyclically, accounting for unknown variables, possibilities. Steve’s safety. His mind always prioritized that. Steve. His weight on him was real and vital. “Keep going. One more level up, then to the right.” 

Steve didn’t question him, only nodded once. Bucky’s internal systems were clocking out everything, mapping directions and times. It was late afternoon, they were headed south; once they exited, they’d head into the wooded area that was directly ahead before making a sharp turn east back to the Quinjet. The plans, and backup plans, ran through his head as they pounded up another level of stairs, hearing the destruction that was following them. Old structures like this had stood the test of time, castles and monuments to important families, wealthy nobility; the families and social systems had failed and been destroyed by history, but the stones they laid on one another had remained. That didn’t make them indestructible. Hundreds of years of history was collapsing. Something about it struck him personally, but there wasn’t time to pick through it now, to follow the twisted threads in it that made him uncomfortable just considering the cracking of stones, the loss of high archways with carved keystones.There wasn’t time now. He tried not to let there be time in general, even when those thoughts seemed to creep up his back in those vulnerable times in the shower. 

Now was not the time.

The corridor was empty, doorless grey walls thick and featureless as all the walls were below. Bucky hadn’t imagined the subterranean areas of a castle looking like the research facilities he had spent countless hours in before Steve had found him; they seemed like they should be more rough hewn, more dungeon-y. Another explosion below them made his shoulders tense. That’s what it was, the thing he hadn’t been able to put his finger on before. That’s what this place was like. A research facility with hard tables passing for beds, straps and injections, nights that seemed eternal, the chill sinking past skin to muscle to bone to soul…

“Buck!”

The shout brought him back to himself and Bucky found himself staring ahead at the end of the tunnel. When had he stopped running beside Steve? Steve was standing by the closed metal door, the thick metal door that was a wall in and of itself. He jogged to catch up to the other man while Steve turned his attention to the control panel by the door. It was an old thing, an outdated box on the wall with switches and buttons.

“Half of these buttons don’t even work,” Steve muttered. Bucky glanced back down the hall. Another explosion, and somewhere, the sound of booted feet. Had he actually heard them? The unmistakable resonance, leather on stone, men running together after escapees like quarry on a hunt. Steve made a quick pained noise and Bucky spun his attention back to him. 

“What happened?” he asked, hearing the harsh note in his own voice.

Steve was shaking out his hand. “Nearly just electrocuted myself. I pulled off the front to get directly at the switch wiring.” He reached in again, carefully eying up the strange wiring that seemed most likely to open the door. This time he gritted his teeth against the pain (Bucky still saw it in the set of his shoulders), even when his teeth felt glued together. Bucky grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back against himself, grabbing him around the waist when Steve’s knees nearly buckled and he let himself rest against his lover for a second.

“I can’t…” he gasped, pushing himself to stand again. “Did the door even budge?” 

Bucky pressed his mouth and shook his head. He was loathe to release Steve as he pulled away, and he tightened his hand into a fist to keep himself for reaching for him again.

“Okay…” Steve looked at the door then nodded to himself, answering an internal question he hadn’t given voice to. “Okay, let me try again.”

“No!” Bucky grabbed Steve’s wrist before he could touch the live wires again. The yellow glare of the overhead light glinted off his silver knuckles. “Steve, are you crazy? You can’t do that; you’ll fry yourself.” He met his eyes squarely, blue on blue. “I’ll do it. I can do it faster, and my arm can take it.”

“Metal’s still a conductor, Bucky,” Steve said quietly. They both looked back down the hall as a large explosion shook the place. 

“It can take it longer than your skin and bones can. Let me do it, Steve. When it’s open, it may not stay. When it’s open enough, get out.” 

“Not without you.” 

“Steve.” It was the only word he could get out of his mouth, and that’s because that word was as natural as breathing to him, maybe even more. Bucky shook his head, then grabbed onto Steve’s arm and gave him a shove toward the door. “When it opens, you get yourself out.”

Steve looked around quickly, like he was looking for another option, for a person to back him up. For that miracle rescue that never came for him. Bucky had his hand on Steve’s arm still, and for a second it was like he could feel both their heartbeats through their connection. The moment ended and he pushed Steve forward. 

The open panel was a mess of wires, the insides partially corroded by time. Bucky reached in as the lights flickered, another explosion rocking the floor. He needed to move fast to make sure the electricity didn’t die on him before he could get this open. That would trap them with no hope of escape. They couldn’t use any incendiary devices on the door for fear of starting a chain reaction that would bury them before they could get out. This was it. 

He lightly traced his index finger over some of the wires. They had a strange give to them; it weirdly put him in mind of stroking some sort of animal. Identifying which wires wasn’t too much of a challenge-- the door went up and down. 

The first little jolt of electricity came when he first pressed the stripped ends of the wires together. He didn’t feel it, per se, but the circuits in his arm registered it. An immediate notification to the nerves of his shoulder. Potential damage. Bucky shook his hand out and rolled his wrist, feeling the neural pathways reset themselves. Glancing over at Steve, he met his eye and nodded.

“You’ve got to be ready.” Was this where he said I love you? Was this where he said things that might not be said in the future? That kept happening to him, words from his future being torn away when that future changed, time after time after time. Steve nodded and both men braced their feet when the corridor rocked with another explosion. Somewhere below them, Bucky could hear the tinny remnants of the bitter old man, whomever he was, who hated them...no, hated Captain America, enough that he would bring down an ancestral home onto himself and them. Maybe he wasn’t even in the building. Maybe he was miles away. No, he wasn’t. Bucky felt it as he reached into the control box again. It was a little like reaching into a ribcage. He picked up one of the wires as delicately as if it had been an old silk ribbon, then completed the circuit with his ring finger. 

This time, the electric jolt was immediate, arcing up through his arm. There were protections against shock in place, of course, things that were there to prevent damage to the rest of him, to keep safe those still too-human organs and arteries. He held the wires with fingers that were stiffening, the advanced mechanisms no match for the onslaught of electricity that used them, coursed through them. It was good, Bucky thought a little distantly, his eyes on Steve whose eyes were on him. His fingers would lock and keep the circuit complete.

The door screeched in its track, the thick metal warring with its usual course as the walls had shifted and were no longer square. It was slow, so slow-- already Bucky could feel that the protections in his arm were breaking down, sacrificing servos but unable to stop the encroachment. He could feel it now, the pain of it that wasn’t just a concept but a reality. He’d dealt with worse pain than this. As the door continued its tortuous journey upward, stripping gears and grinding metal, Bucky focused on how warm Steve was after a shower, thinking of what it was like when he came up behind him in the kitchen and just held him as if everything was normal, as if their lives were made up of evenings cooking pasta and wrestling in bed and watching movies neither of them had seen even though the rest of the world knew them by heart. 

The world flickered, his vision and the lights blacking out in patches. He just needed to hold on, he just needed to see Steve through. But he couldn’t depend on anything he was seeing now. Bucky couldn’t feel his hands, either one, and there was a deep sharp pain in his chest. It was ripping him up on the inside, and he couldn’t tell whether Steve had made it out yet or not. He just had to keep holding it, keep thinking about Steve. 

Steve. Steve. Steve.

Everything was black and cold and the dark pressed in like a presence against his eyes and his skull. That was all there was.

The weirdest thing about this goddamned facility, Bucky thought drowsily to himself, is that there isn’t any real day or night. 

The words seemed to be coming from a great distance, dragged up from somewhere very deep inside himself where words still waited to be threaded together like a string of pearls. Some of those words didn’t even have anything to do with the war. There were words that were soft, like ‘sweater’ or ‘marshmallow.’ There were some that tasted like something, like ‘mint’ or ‘summer.’ There were some that sat heavy in his stomach. Like ‘betrayal.’ Like ‘experiment.’ Like ‘death.”

Bucky opened his eyes and stared up at the high ceiling, bare metal rafters and beams. There were windows, small ones, high up on the metal walls, but they’d all been painted over with some sort of dark wash and the little light they let in was almost more depressing than no light at all. It was impossible to know the time, or when the next shift of sadists was coming in. They all called themselves ‘doctor,’ the German way of saying it that made the word harsher and weightier, but since they seemed to be making him consistently sicker and worse feeling, it seemed like maybe that was a bad word for them. 

He shifted on the metal table that had been serving as his bed for some time now. His wrists and ankles had been strapped down originally, but now...they didn’t even need to do that. He didn’t have the energy to so much as sit up without help. Fighting back had felt so good initially, forcing them to hold him down to get a blood sample or inject him with one of those big needles that were pushing God knew what into his body. Nobody had mentioned this in basic training.

Nope, nobody had mentioned anything like this. He’d excelled at whatever they’d thrown at him, and when they shipped him off to Europe, he’d been fine with that as well. Even that time he’d gotten that piece of shrapnel in his thigh-- digging that out had been hell, it had burned like fire-- he’d still been able to help another soldier who was more injured than he was back into a foxhole and relative safety. Warfare was dirtier than they’d made it seem, scarier, more personal. Even then, Bucky had been able to survive it. It wasn’t thriving, but it was living, staying alive and keeping other people alive as well. 

In here, well...what the hell was this at all?

Was this even the same war?

When they injected him with things, sometimes it felt like his veins were on fire from the outside. He felt himself sweating, then shivering, against the metal table that was cold and wet from his perspiration. Sometimes it was an almost painful itch, like there were thousands of ants crawling through his veins, over one another in their haste to just move while he was trapped there, still, frozen, swallowing over and over to try to get some relief for his dry throat.

Sometimes they asked him questions, but they were largely routine at this point. Bucky gave no answers (that they had trained him on), and at this point, they couldn’t have expected anything. He was a grunt soldier, and he’d been here so long that anything the Allies were doing in the outside world was more a mystery to him than it would be to them. 

The big battle, the only battle, for him anymore was staying conscious, staying himself, not giving in to the numbness that had climbed into him as though it was person-shaped, Bucky-shaped, and had settled into his skin as though it could force him out and take up residence. It was the reason he couldn’t get up, the reason he didn’t fight when they took blood or wrote down vitals or any of the rest. The room was quiet, the ticking of the weak heating system as it rattled through the pipes that snaked their way around the room was still for the moment. 

His body ached, ached as though it was old, ached as though his bones had become something else inside of him and even if the rest of him wanted to move, they would insist on remaining. They would rip through his flesh to stay, anchored to this table. They’d be back soon, though how soon was impossible to say as the hours crept by without meaning, and then he would have to steel himself against whatever they did this time. But it was so hard to care right now. So hard to fight, so hard not to listen to the insidious ways they tried to trick answers out of him. The only way to let his mouth speak but say nothing was to do exactly what he’d been trained to do. 

There was something going on at a distance. He didn’t think it was outside, though the sound was diffused and fractured. Somewhere inside the facility? Honestly, he didn’t even know how big it was. He’d been kept with a group of other POWs in what amounted to a livestock cage until he and a few others had been taken out and brought...well, he’d been brought here. He didn’t know where the others were. Bucky did know that there had been other captured soldiers here in this big room, but they seemed to come and go. Why didn’t he? Was he succeeding or failing? Some were taken out when they died, when they didn’t make it through the torture of whatever it was these Nazi assholes were doing to them. Probably testing out poisons, chemical compounds they intended to use...had he had this thought already? It was horrible to know your mind was wandering in ways that were not the summer afternoon wanderings that led to great ideas of trouble to get into with Steve..

Bucky’s lips were dry, but he tried to wet them with his chalky tongue. He wanted to say it, not out loud, of course, but before they came in, he just wanted his mouth to form that one word. Steve. Steve. He couldn’t give the word any real breath, just the shape of it, how it would hold for a second on the tip of his tongue before the satisfaction of his top teeth lightly pressing into his bottom lip. Steve. He thought of what it had felt like for his friend to fall asleep on his shoulder during the home trip on the train from Coney Island. He thought of laughing with his hand on the back of Steve’s neck. He brought his thoughts into focus for a second to find what it had been like to feel Steve’s breath against his ear when they had both crammed themselves into Steve’s bed in his tiny apartment to sleep.

There was something going on. His thoughts were glazing over a he stared up at the ceiling again and let his vision blur so that everything was just grey. Was that the sound of gunfire? Why wasn’t he trying to move? Why weren’t his muscles tensed for action, rather than just tight around his aching bones? They’d be coming soon, to do things to ask questions. To try to pry things free from him, like the location of bases and what the fine gold hair on Steve’s arms felt like when you accidentally brushed against him.

The gunfire sounded closer, and Bucky felt himself slip, like something had tilted in his mind. They were coming and he couldn’t move, so he let training take over. The words spilled out, quiet as a whisper; someone would have to bend close to actually hear what he was saying, to pick the individual words apart from the long stream they’d become. 

“United States Army. Barnes James Buchanan. Sergeant. 32557…” They all went together and they didn’t really mean anything anymore. Not even his name. 

“Bucky?”

Who the hell was Bucky?

“Bucky? Oh my God.” A face swam into view, golden against the blurry backdrop of grey. Bucky wanted to argue with it, with the impossible reality of Steve’s face, smudged almost artistically with dirt and smoke. Steve’s face broadened out into the promise that so many people had patronizingly told him it would someday. 

“What?” It had stopped the slurry of meaningless words, seeing him here, trying to force his tired, rusty brain through new channels, new thoughts. Steve was here, which was already impossible. Steve looked like...this. Was that more or less impossible? It was Steve though, really Steve. He never doubted, never thought his brain would do that to him. Even he wasn’t that cruel to himself.

“Come on.” Steve’s voice was the same- it was earnest and worried and urgent. How could Bucky disappoint him like this? He couldn’t move. He hurt all the way through, he was pinned to the table with pain that ran through his body and thickened his blood. His mind felt pressed in on all sides, with shadows leaping out of strange corners before disappearing again. 

Then Steve touched his face, just for a second, his fingers pressed against his jawline, his cheek. His hand was warm and solid and some of that immediately moved through Bucky, thawing out veins and arteries that had gone sluggish. Bucky almost gasped with the sudden sensation, the intensity of it. It was the opposite of an infusion of pain; it loosened and warmed him, cleared out his head. 

“Steve?” Saying it out loud for the first time in forever. His voice was tired and hoarse, but that warmth was still moving in him. Steve gripped his shoulder and pulled him to sit up. Even if Bucky had imagined it the first time, it was undeniable now, that flood of warmth and energy that felt like it was seaming up things inside him that had been torn open. His balance wasn’t a sure thing as he stood up, but he could move, and the sensation continued to spread through him as he limped, then walked, then ran with Steve. His mind was still churning with questions that Steve wasn’t fully answering. (“Did it hurt?” “A little.” “Is it permanent?” “So far.”) But even having those questions felt good. The questions reminded him there were things he could ask, that he could be dissatisfied with the answers and ask more. 

Whenever his energy flagged on the long march back, Steve would touch his back, rub his shoulder, and it was the same thing every single time. Bucky started to think he was crazy from his time imprisoned. At night, when they rested, the ground was cold and the chill would try to seep back into his bones. Then Steve would sit down next to him, grimy and heroic in that outfit with the bold stars and stripes, almost impossible to blend into the memories of him that Bucky had taken across the Atlantic with him. But he talked in that same quiet voice that meant every word, and it was him, it was so undeniably him. Bucky didn’t know how he’d get used to looking up to talk to him, how he’d get used to the broad shoulders where he’d loved the narrow ones. But the energy between them hadn’t changed, and Steve leaned against him with a habitual comfort born out of their years and years before. 

Maybe it was just how badly he’d missed him that created that sensation when Steve touched him. When he touched him, it was energy coming back, broken things mending slowly. The cold was insistent, the crunch of snow under their boots or against their backs. They were resting for a few hours on the ground, unable to walk any further without some relief for the weakened soldiers who had been prisoners all that time. Bucky had come to hate the cold, even as he felt used to it. What he craved was the warmth of Steve’s hand, the warmth that it sent through his entire body. In the dark, away from the soldiers acting as sentries for the night, Bucky found himself reaching out before his mind had really agreed to it. The cold was the excuse, of course. He just hated to be cold. Whatever had happened to Steve, whatever he said he had agreed to that had made him taller and stronger and enough like someone else that it had taken two days for him to be able to stop staring, whatever chemicals the United States government had pumped into a skinny kid from Brooklyn to turn him into a superman, he was warm now. Steve had never been warm before. Bucky’s brain instantly recalled winters walking to school with his best friend shivering by his side. He remembered chafing Steve’s hands when even mittens weren’t doing the trick in autumn when the sun went down and they were waiting for the train. The train had been late and Bucky knew that Steve had noticed the wind before he had. They’d stood close together, close enough that Bucky could block the sharper gusts while lending the heat of his body. Through his clothes, through Steve’s. Sleepovers at his house after a long night of Steve trying to get through his thick skull how trigonometry worked and what it was supposed to do for him. There was nothing more intimate that sharing body heat.

He had always been the warm one. Now, he craved Steve’s warmth when they laid down on the cold ground, where the soil of Europe wanted to leech away any heat he had left inside him. Bucky was only warm now when the light of the bonfire was on his face and Steve was curled around his back, lending back the warmth he had given him what felt like forever ago. Steve had an endless source now; he was warm as anything, warm as summer, warm as a running motor, warm as something that was always the sensation of home. New York City had definitely never been a tropical paradise, but home was huddling in the back of a bus and laughing with Steve, was drinking too-hot coffee with bleary eyes before heading to work at 5 in the morning, was the stuff everyone talked about like Christmas and Fourth of July. And Steve. His bones and his blood and his body stopped aching when Steve was there, his soul only stopped gasping for air when Steve touched him.

Bucky gasped sharply and it felt like a hundred tiny locations in his body exploded with pain. Starbursts like warfare behind his eyes, in the back of his head, at the back of his sternum, through his right hip, his left shoulder, when his lungs fought to expand. He inhaled again like air was precious and the pain slowly receded. It washed back to be replaced by the cold again, the cold beneath him seeping up through his left arm first, the metal drawing it and the sensors registering it with specific numbers, the temperature in degrees. Celsius. Fahrenheit. Crunching sounds to his left…

“Buck! Bucky.” Warmth against his face, Steve’s hand. He would know it sleeping, unconscious, dead. “Bucky, you there? Wake up. Please.” 

He felt like he’d been asleep a hundred years as he opened his eyes. They were gritty and swollen. How was he here? The faulty lines of electricity making him a circuit, the sacrifice that would always be worth it. As Steve rubbed his cheek, the rest of him resolved itself. Steve’s face was grimy with the leftover traces of explosions, with cleaner lines on his cheeks that Bucky recognized as tear tracks. So he’d survived. He knew that was impossible. There was no way he could have survived.

“Steve.” His voice was a toad’s croak, an ancient radio announcement crackling in and out of focus. To his credit, Steve didn’t react with anything other than relief. “How…” Bucky tried to sit up, knowing Steve would try to stop him and relaxing into it when Steve put an arm around his shoulders.

“Hey, not now. Let’s just...get out of here, okay?” Steve’s voice was a little strained, though Bucky knew him well enough by this point, knew the little notes behind his words. Sort of the way some people could sip an expensive wine or smell a perfume and claim to taste wood, smoke, smell white musk and just a hint of lavender. He could hear the tears that Steve was working really hard to cover up, and then the laughter that was threatening to sneak out even though the situation was probably still pretty dire. 

Bucky shifted, figuring that he had energy for either movement or talking, not both. With Steve’s help, sitting up was attainable first, and the longer Steve’s hand was on his back, the easier it got to move on his own. The stiff ache in his joints melted away slowly. Snow fell out of his hair and off his upper back as he made it to his feet. The cold lingered in his right knee, the reminder of an old injury he didn’t even remember. (Had it been a high school football tackle or a fall off a bridge in 1965?) 

The trip back to the Quinjet felt like it took hours. Bucky was determined not to rest, not to permit himself to think of the weather, the snow blanketing everything. Idyllic if he hadn’t been out in it. Bucky let himself drag slightly when the wind picked up, energy flagging until Steve touched his arm or his back. That little flood of warmth again, the sensation of wellness and safety. 

This is what it’s been, he thought, the realization filtering through slowly, pieces coming together and distracting him from the actual hike back to the Quinjet. This is what it’s always been. He thought of his own hands, both of them, on Steve’s back during an asthma attack that seemed like it would never end. The warmth between them had been extreme on a summer night and the spasm had passed and color had come back to Steve’s lips. That day...evening...night...when Steve had found him in the H.Y.D.R.A. facility, how he had been immobile and frozen to the table until Steve had touched him. 

And back there? 

It was the same thing. It had to be science, because what else was there? Soul mates? Miracles? Maybe he was too cold and tired and, you know, had been dead. It kept recurring in his head, the idea. He couldn’t have survived. If there was one thing he knew now, one lesson that had stayed with him longer and more fully than any other, it was what made someone dead. Killing and death had been his life. He knew what it took to shut down the human body. He had known that when he put his hand into the console, when he’d completed the circuit.

Yet here he was, walking. Not just alive, but upright, moving, and with enough brain capacity to let him work his way through all of this. Not that there were many answers to be had, but the thinking was there. He still had a life expectancy from which to look back. He had been dead, or so close that there really wasn’t a veil to speak of. And Steve had brought him back. Just by touching him. As he had stopped Steve’s aches, his pains, his coughing and wheezing. No one else did this. Just the two of them. It wasn’t a symptom of whatever had been done to them. It was something else. There were answers, but he didn’t have them. He didn’t know if he’d ever have them. He wasn’t sure if it mattered. The questions were just as real. They made him just as real.

Inside the Quinjet, the air was warm and mercifully windless. Bucky groaned as the ramp closed up behind them, feeling the start of the thaw in his chilled body. He was pretty sure he could have laid down right there on the floor and slept.

“That’s going to be a storm,” Steve said, putting his hand on Bucky’s shoulder as he walked past him to check on the cockpit instruments. “The snow’s really picking up out there.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Bucky grumbled, pulling off his gloves with nearly numb fingers. Undoing the clasps on his jacket proved even more difficult. Soon his fingertips would feel that burning sensation that warmth after cold brought on.

“About what?” Steve’s voice was slightly distracted as he checked another monitor. 

“Being the Winter Soldier. I’m the Summer Soldier from now on. This is bullshit.”

“Language.”

“Well, I was going to say hogwash, but that seemed extreme.” Bucky could still hear the exhausted strain in his own voice, but it was easy to grin cockily at Steve when he looked over at him with a matching smile. “I’m freezing.”

Bucky stood still as Steve walked over, willing himself not to flinch when he took both his hands. What did his metal fingers feel like? Too cold, burning cold to the touch. Why didn’t Steve let him go? The pressure on both hands was the same. Steve didn’t differentiate. 

“Come on, let’s use the bed in back. We have to wait out the storm anyway, and we can just pile all the blankets onto it.” Steve said it easily, matter-of-fact. Standing there holding both of his hands as though he was a whole person. Standing there sending currents of warmth and that something else through him, through his wrists, up his arms, buzzing along his collar bones. 

“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” he found himself agreeing. He was still agreeing when they were on the bed, both Steve and him under the heap of blankets like they were still kids playing hooky and hiding in their room. They’d shed their outer layers in messy piles, reaching to help one another. What were they rushing for? There was no one watching them out here. There was peace in knowing that.

Drowsiness was creeping in and Bucky let himself rest against Steve, letting the other man be his support. Steve’s cheek was against his hair, which had mostly dried in the warmth of the Quinjet. The ruins of the castle were far away, snow falling on what had become a tomb for a nameless enemy. He didn’t want to think about it, not with Steve’s hand lazily rubbing his bare arm or working out the tangles in his hair. 

“Steve?” The hand in his hair paused.

“I thought you were asleep, Buck,” Steve said quietly. “Go ahead, get some shut eye. We’re safe now, and we’ve got time before the weather clears.”

“Yeah...I know. I’m just thinking. I know, dangerous.” Bucky closed his eyes as he smiled, feeling Steve’s smile against his head. “Back there...you must have dragged me out. That level of electricity...Steve.”

“You really scared me there for a minute,” Steve said quietly. “Touch and go.” 

“Come on, Steve. That should have killed me.” Bucky opened his eyes but didn’t sit up. He was loathe to break the contact they had right now. I know it killed me, he thought but didn’t say aloud.

“Well...you weren’t breathing.” Steve chuckled a little awkwardly. “Good thing I’m CPR trained, huh?”

“CPR.” Bucky raised his eyebrows. As though he didn’t know that nervous laugh of Steve’s, as though he hadn’t known it since grade school. Fine. Even Captain America could lie, though he’d maybe forgotten that there was no one else who knew him like Bucky did. No one on this earth, alive or otherwise. Just as quickly, he realized he didn’t need the answers just now anyway. They had whatever this was. Putting a label on it wouldn’t make it better. It was more likely to make them something Stark would want to experiment on, and to be frank, he’d really had enough of experimentation for the rest of his life. However long that was. 

“Yeah.” Steve made a noise when Bucky sat up a little. “You okay?”

Bucky shifted, lifting his chin to kiss Steve lightly once. “Yeah. I think I’m going to make it.” Before Steve could reply, he kissed him again, pressing forward until there were fewer open spaces between them. He didn’t want anything between them, and his metal arm was warm where it was against Steve’s body. He was something whole, he was something alive. When he was with Steve, he was real. 

Steve’s hand moved to the back of his neck to hold him, fingers propped against the base of his skull. Without thinking, Bucky raised his hand to cradle Steve’s jaw in a metal palm. Before he could change his mind, Steve was suddenly kissing him harder. As he moved forward, Bucky laid back and drew him down to himself. One of the blankets slipped and Bucky laughed against Steve’s mouth before tilting his head to kiss him again. He was so real. They were both so alive and so real. 

Outside, the storm whistled against the hull of the jet, seeking out any openings and trying to creep inside. But the Quinjet was strong against the wind and snow, melting the ice off its wings as it waited out the storm, as it waited to fly them home.


End file.
